Soaring oil prices have recently put resource issues back in the public eye. In fact, conventional technology is exhausting its resource base at an accelerating rate, an acceleration exacerbated by the revolution of rising expectations in the less-developed world due to the global communications revolution. Nanotechnology is the only way to provide something like a sustainable First World standard of living for the entire world. Fortunately, furthermore, many resource-related nanotechnology applications involve nanostructured materials rather than full molecular machines and so are accessible in the near term.

Applications include:

Greatly increased energy efficiency:

Non-thermal energy use. Burning a fuel wastes most of its energy. However, utilizing chemical energy without thermalizing it, as in fuel cells, requires molecular structuring.

Distributed fabrication. Supplanting the massive importation of raw materials into conventional factories, and their re-export as finished products, by nanoscale fabrication from local materials will make the enormous present transportation infrastructure obsolete,.

Superstrength materials.

As materials having strengths approaching the limits set by chemical bonds become available, they will make transportation considerably more efficient through savings in vehicle mass.

Molecular separation

Element separation, whether for pollution control or resource extraction, is not intrinsically energy-intensive. The enormous energy costs of present-day pyrometallurgy largely result from the application of heat to force phase changes. Biosystems achieve their efficiencies by using direct molecular separation via specialized molecular machinery. "Biomimetic" molecular separation will have the effect of blurring the distinction between a "pollutant" and a "resource." The 5000 year-old paradigm of digging up and "cooking" anomalous geologic deposits to extract desired materials is coming to its end.

Change of materials mix

As nanoscale fabrication makes accessible the ultimate materials strengths set by covalent chemical bonds, the structural metals that dominate present technology will become obsolete. The carbonate rock that forms the bulk of the crustal carbon reservoir will become an important backstop resource, as will even the silicates that make up most of a rocky planet.

Off-Earth resources

By vastly decreasing vehicle and payload mass, nanotechnology will make near-Earth space access considerably more economic in the relatively near term, so that solar power satellites and asteroidal metal become more attractive.